Introduction to Archaeology
Anthro 304 / ARY 301 Spring 1997Prof. Samuel M. Wilson
Department of Anthropology, University of Texas
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Information on the site of Cerén
El Salvador volcanoes
The archaeology of childhood
[draft: please do not cite]Samuel M. Wilson
Easily lost among the refuse of the past, so small and ephemeral in
their construction and so carelessly disposed of, are children's toys. Like
children themselves, they sometimes escape the attention of grown-ups.
Grown-up archaeologists tend to be interested in grown-up things --
economies, politics, social hierarchies, etc. Meanwhile, perhaps half of
the people in the societies they study were very young, and uninterested in
such things. The archaeology of childhood is elusive and the artifacts of
children are easy to miss unless you look very carefully for them.
At Iroquoian sites in the Great Lakes miniature ceramic vessels are
often found in the archaeological deposits. From the Beeton Site, for
example, in southern Ontario, archaeologists recovered a tiny pot made
from a lump of clay. A tiny thumb or finger, too small to be a grown-up's,
formed the inside of the pot and the tiny impression of a fingernail is still
there. The same kinds of pots can be found throughout the world,
wherever pottery was used. Like play-dough, lumps of clay lying around
were used to make all sorts of curious things. At the Ontario sites, small
clay versions of smoking pipes were also found, but without the holes.
Discarded after their brief use-life, these clay objects stay on to perplex
archaeologists.
A lot of unusual things get relegated to the category of "enigmatic
finds" and stuck at the end of archaeological reports. Smithsonian
archaeologist Gus Van Beek recently made some headway with one such
group of objects. In analyzing the artifacts from the Israeli site of Tell
Jemmeh, Van Beek recognized a toy from his childhood among the
unidentified artifacts from the excavations. They were rounded disks an
inch or two across made out of a broken piece of pottery. The disks were
drilled with two holes. [ILLUSTRATION] Earlier archaeologists had taken
them for buttons, or had simply described them as "perforated disks". But
Van Beek and his colleagues saw in them a toy called a "buzz". To play you
run a loop of string through the two holes, and hold the ends of the loop
one in each hand. Then get the string wound up, and when you pull the two
ends of the loop apart, the disk or buzz in the middle will spin. Van Beek
found instances of this simple toy in the Near East and east to the Indus
Valley, India, China, Japan, and Korea. They are found among Native
American people in North and South America, and even in the remains of
British army camps from the time of the Revolutionary War ("The Buzz: a
simple toy from Antiquity", Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental
Research, Number 275, 1989, 53-58).
Most toys were probably very fragile and short lived. Among
societies whose people make their own toys today (and whose preferences
are not dictated by television advertising and toy-store chains), there is a
repertoire of goods that is quite similar from group to group and continent
to continent. The most common kinds of toys allow children to do things
that grown-ups do, but on a miniature scale. There are small versions of
hunting and fishing gear, model boats, harpoons and baskets. Perhaps most
common are dolls and the similarly scaled pots and plates and things that
go with them. Noisemakers are also very common, including rattles,
whistles, and "bullroarers" you whirl around your head on a string. There
are the pieces and markers that go along with games, balls, and things like
tops or the "buzz" that are fun to play with by themselves.
The majority of prehistoric objects thought to be toys correspond to
the occupations of grown ups. Plato argued that parents should emphasize
this, that children should be encouraged in forms of play which emulate
adult occupations:
.. if a boy is to be a good farmer, or
again, a good builder, he should play,
in the one case at building toy houses,
in the other at farming, and both
should be provided by their tutors with
miniature tools on the pattern of real
ones. (Plato, Laws I. 643B)
[see Leslie Beaumont, "Child's play in Athens", History Today,
v44,n8,p30+6, 1994]
This is a noble aim, and something that children enjoy. I wonder if Plato also had the experience of giving a child an "educational" toy, and then have him or her make a temple to Dionysus out of the box it came in.
Anthropologist Lorna Marshall lived for years among the Nyae Nyae
!Kung people of the Kalahari in Namibia and observed this pattern of
children's play mirroring adult behavior:
"much of the play of young children is imitation of the elders' daily activity. It is not surprising that one favorite theme they enact is hunting, gathering, preparing food, and eating it. The children take up the roles of men and women. The boys go out to hunt (they do not go far -- twenty or thirty feet perhaps). They carry back leaves and twigs on carrying-sticks held over the shoulders, as the hunters carry meat. The little girls dig for roots with their mothers' digging sticks. They pound the "food" in their mothers' mortars and pretend to cook and eat it" (The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, Harvard Press, 1976).
This is not to portray the "bushmen" as holdovers from prehistory as has sometimes been done, for the Nyae Nyae !Kung have lived through as many accommodations to a changing world as any other group, but rather to see there's a lot of similarity in the way kids play all over the world.
In the dry shelters of the Lower Pecos region on the Texas-Mexico border, an environment that has a lot of similarities with the Kalahari, archaeologists have excavated very well preserved artifacts made of wood, fibre, and leather, things which would not normally be preserved for long in an archaeological site. Archaeologist Ken Brown studied over 100 such artifacts from the region, among them child-sized versions of digging sticks, wood and fiber snares, and netted backpack frames. He draws a distinction between these artifacts and toys like the "buzz" or whistles, that are strictly for play. He sees these prehistoric objects as tools for teaching children how to behave and survive in the world, and at the same time perhaps to make a small contribution to the group's quest for food (Wooden Artifacts from the Lake Amistad Area, ms. at the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory).
Except for toys made of stone, pottery, or some other durable material, most of the things kids play with disappear completely through centuries of decay in archaeological deposits. The Lower Pecos artifacts are remarkable because of their excellent preservation. Some of the more durable things that generally survive in archaeological sites would be very difficult to identify as childrens' artifacts in the first place because the meaning and value of the objects comes from the games being played with them. Things like blocks and play building materials might be almost impossible to recognize out of context. I have nearly thrown away my children's prized goods, thinking they were pieces of junk, and as an archaeologist I may have done just that with the artifacts of children that lived thousands of years ago. Mark Twain captures what an archaeologist has as the source of information about the toys of children past when Tom Sawyer, trying to get his friends to whitewash the fence for him, reached in his pocket and ". . . got out his worldly wealth and examined it -- bits of toys, marbles, and trash...".
A great many archaeologists are justifiably wary of seeing any
miniature artifact as a toy. Probably the most famous of prehistoric
artifacts that are thought to be toys are the wheeled dogs and other
animals from preconquest tombs in Mexico [ILLUSTRATION]. Archaeologist
Francisco Javier Hernandez argued in an extensive study (El Juguete
Popular en Mexico; Estudio de Interpretacion Ediciones Mexicanas, 1950, V.
10) that these were ritual objects made specifically to be buried with
someone. This is probably also the case with the elaborate dioramas
buried with Egyptian royalty in the 3rd and 4th millennium B.C.
[ILLUSTRATION] These miniature figures carried the things a person would
need with him or her into the next world.
Miniature versions of everyday objects can have potent ritual
significance. A recent exhibit at the Idaho State Historical Museum in
Boise (Backtracking: Ancient Art of Southern Idaho) included a number of
small human figurines identified as possible dolls [ILLUSTRATION, figure
56]. Some Shoshoni people who visited the exhibit, descendants of makers
of the artifacts, saw them as the powerful representations of the
supernatural character nu'-numbi, perhaps taken from a shaman or priest's
paraphernalia.
Clearly, associating anything that is made in miniature with
children is naive, just as it would be naive to see everything small as of
ritual importance. As always in archaeology, context -- where something
is located and what is around it -- is the most important clue for
understanding what things were and how they were used.
The idea that the artifacts we identify as toys might all have had
different meanings in that past connects with the powerful and influential
argument put forward by French historian Philippe Aries in Centuries of
Childhood (1960). He argued that the Western conception of childhood as
a distinct stage of human development only emerged in the last few
centuries. He says that childhood as we think of it, a protected time of
make believe and play, was not thought of in the same way before the 17th
century. A child's early years would indeed have been different in the
past, if only because childhood mortality was generally much higher. (In
Roman society, for instance, infant mortality is estimated at nearly one
third of live births and half the population was under the age of 20; Tim
Parkin, Roman Demography and Society, Johns Hopkins U. Pr. 1992). Some
have argued that in prehistory and even in recent centuries parents
showed relative indifference toward their children precisely because so
few infants survived. The brilliant 16th century French essayist Michel de
Montaigne lost five of his six daughters in infancy and confessed that he
could not "entertain that passion for caressing new-born infants, that
have neither mental activities nor recognizable bodily shape by which to
make themselves lovable...". But in the same essay, on the "Affection of
Fathers for their Children", he held the love of parents for their progeny to
be second only to the instinct for survival in all creatures.
Although Aries is right that people in different cultures and at
different times think about children and families in very different ways,
there is still a great deal of similarity in the way children play, wherever
they are. The earliest documents in human history talk about children at
play, and their descriptions sound similar the world over. Greek vase
paintings of children playing mirror Egyptian tomb murals [ILLUSTRATION]
and recall the earliest Chinese poetry.
Some archaeological circumstances provide a rather grim glimpse at
the material life of people, including the material possessions of little
people whose toys are preserved by catastrophic events. Imagine the
distribution of artifacts in a household with children if the inhabitants
had to flee on a moment's notice. This happened at a Mayan site in
western El Salvador, now called Cerén, in 595 A.D. The inhabitants fled
leaving everything -- crops in the field, food in the pot, their most
cherished goods, and their children's toys -- just where they were. A
nearby volcanic eruption covered the whole settlement with volcanic ash.
Through the careful and sensitive work of archaeologist Payson Sheets and
his colleagues, this site gives us a remarkable glimpse of life in the Maya
Classic period.
One of the houses at Cerén contained a complete inventory of the
artifacts of everyday life. Beside a central doorway, just (in my view)
where a kid would sit, was a miniature pot and a scatter of twenty small
shards of pottery. Christian J. Zier, who reported these finds in one of
Sheets's monographs (Archeology and Volcanism in Central America. Univ.
of Texas Press, 1983), said these "may be the playthings of a child, and
could indicate that this is a child's room. This statement is tentative at
best and will remain so." This is characteristic caution for
archaeologists, for we never can really know, but looking at their
reconstructions of the distribution of objects in the house, and then at my
own house, it seems like a sound interpretation to me.
The inhabitants of the Cerén house apparently had enough time to escape the eruption, even if they left their material possessions behind. At the village of Kukulik, on St. Lawrence Island at the southern inlet of the Bering between Alaska and Siberia, the inhabitants faced a more terrible threat. The entire population of the village was wiped out by a raging epidemic and famine in 1879. This kind of dreadful aftermath of contact occurred many times in earlier centuries in other parts of the Americas, but the full impact of European contact came late to St. Lawrence Island. Archaeological excavations in the 1930s brought to light an extraordinary range of artifacts at Kukulik, made of wood, bone, and other things which ordinarily are not preserved in archaeological deposits. Among them were things that were probably toys -- dolls, miniature kayaks, small carved bears and seals. [ILLUSTRATION]
In my own archaeological research in North America and the
Caribbean I have excavated enigmatic things that did not fall into any
obvious artifact category: a collection of different colored rocks, a few
fossilized endocasts of shellfish, a half burned lump of clay with a hole in
it, badly made little arrowheads that could not have been useful in their
finished forms. It was not until I had children and saw my own children's
piles of treasure that these finds started to make sense. Just as in
decades past a male-dominated field of archaeology had been blind to the
presence of women in the archaeological record, a grown-up-dominated
field has found it very hard to see children in the past. We should, I
believe, still try to imagine and understand the way children see the
world, and in fact we would probably enjoy it. One of the wonderful parts
of being a parent is the opportunity to go back and experience a child's
way of looking at the world for a while. Plutarch's story from the first
century B.C. of the King Agesilaus playing with his kids has it just right:
Once, when they were very small,
[Agesilaus] bestrode a stick, and was playing
horse with them in the house, and
when he was spied doing this by one of
his friends, he entreated him not to tell
anyone until he himself should be a
father of children. (Agesilaus XXV, 5)